Jonathan Safran Foer

“It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.”

“The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.”

“I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.”

“The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.”

“I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.”

“Songs are as sad as the listener.”

“She was a prism through with sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum”

“I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.”

“I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.”

“As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.”

“One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.”

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

“We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.”

“Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.”

“Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.”

“We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don't. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line... I don't mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.”

“For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.”

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.”

“Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?”

“Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?”